bunny hop

A Bunny Hop is the act of making a bikejump into the air. Bunny Hops originated as a trick done on a BMX, but have become an essential part of any mountain biker or urban cyclist's skillset, as they provide an easy way to avoid rocks or curbs. Learning how to bunnyhop is a long process. Being confident enough to do it at speed whilst dodging a bus will take longer still.

It helps to start with either top-clips or clipless pedals (the ones where a cleat on your shoe locks into the pedal) as this lets you familiarise yourself with the weight distribution without needing to worry about the big issue of lifting the rear of the bike. However, even if you regularly use clips, learning to bunny hop on flat pedals will improve your technique and confidence. As with any bike trick, somewhere quiet and flat is required for the learning process, a grass field is ideal.

In order to bunny hop, you must be travelling reasonably fast, as this makes the balancing easier. Travelling too fast, especially at first, is a bad idea, for obvious reasons. Once you are moving, stop pedalling, and rotate your pedals so that the crank arms are parallel to the ground. The choice of which foot is at the front differs from person to person, but you will find one is much more comfortable than another. Pull up on the handlebars, and shift your weight back slightly, as if you were going into a small wheelie. Once the front wheel is about a foot into the air, shift your weight forward slightly, and in the same motion pull up on the pedals. With the help of the toe clips, this should be fairly easy, and you should find yourself airbone. Practise, and you'll get the hang of it within a week.

The hardest bit is learning how to pull up on the pedals without anything holding your feet in place. This seems like a physical impossibility, as any upward motion with your feet should cause them to leave the pedals, most likely causing you to loose your balance and crash. The trick is to tilt the pedals forward, at an angle of roughly 45 degrees, and simultaneously push backwards and pull upwards. The backwards force keeps you feet locked to the pedals and provides enough friction to allow the upward force to lift the bike into the air. Pushing forward and up on the handlebars will help the bike gain more height at the same time. Learning this is not easy, and you can expect to fall off several times, before finally getting maybe half an inch into the air.

Once you have learnt the basic bunny hop, you will need to practise lots to gain height. Once you can comfortably jump half a foot into the air (which will take a few months), you can start to practise jumping up curbs. The easiest way to learn how to do this is to just ride at a small curb, hop, and hope for the best. You are unlikely to do any damage to yourself or the bike if you hit the curb. Build up your speed and height until you can confidently land both wheels on the curb simultaneously, then you should be confident about clearing other obstacles.

Bunnyhopping is often used in first-person shooters not just to move faster, but for many people to dodge. Back in the misty times long forgotten people realized that you'd be harder to hit if you just jumped. Thus, while the average player is probably aiming for your center of mass or in a game with location-specific damage, your head in the hopes of getting a headshot you'll leap out of the way and thus avoid damage entirely or simply take it in a less painful place. If one jump is good people assumed a lot of jumping is better and would thus jump around randomly the entire time to avoid being hit.

Realizing this is irritating and highly unrealistic many recent games have thus implemented some form of stamina. Day of Defeat especially tries to be a bit more realistic than many other mods and provides a stamina bar that slowly depletes when you jump or run quickly or such requiring you to rest occasionally. Firearms and the Opera also follow suit while TFC, Natural Selection, and Counter-Strike (where it can often be quite a problem) leave things as they are.

Bunnyhopping is also the name of a basic manouver on a
bike which is important in bicycle trials. A bunnyhop is where you get both wheels off the
ground at the same time. This is either done by shifting your weight and kicking your feet back or by using clipless pedals. This tutorial was written for those of us with flat pedals. If you have spuds and need a tutorial you should be seriously rethinking why you need to know this!

Now, if you've never seen it done before it may seem
impossible (in my case it seemed impossible even after I
saw it done), but don't worry, it can be done. A bunnyhop
is made up of two moves - picking up the front of the bike
by lifting the handlebars and lifting the back of the bike by kicking your feet back. Because it's much harder to lift the back of the bike it is preferrable to keep your weight shifted forward. It's also necessary to tilt you feet forward, on an angle a little shallower than this /. So, now what we have is a combination of shifting your weight forward then lifting the handlebars then kicking your feet back.

Still can't do it? Don't worry, this is completely normal.
One way that can make it easier to learn is if you just
concentrate on moving the back end without worrying about
lifting the front wheel. Try getting waay over the
handlebars and then tilting your feet and kicking back. If
this still isn't working you could add a little bit of
front brake, but this is getting into another move, the
endo AKA the nosepick.

Now that you've mastered lifting the back wheel it's time
to put it all together. Lift your front wheel as high as
you can, shift your weight forward and then push the front
end down while kicking you feet back. As you become more
proficient try to minimize pushing the front down and also
try to make it one fluid motion. Before long you should be able to do all this at once, making it look like you've got antigravitytires or something, and confusing all those
suckers still trying to learn to bunnyhop. I bet you feel cooler now, don't you?

In first person shooter computer games, bunnyhopping is a technique directly derived from strafe jumping, which allowed for movement that is much faster than normally possible. The impact of the ability to attain increased speed within the game is naturally very significant .

In essence, bunnyhopping involves performing a series of continuous strafe jumping (I recommend you read the strafe jumping node). It gains its distinction from strafe jumping because it is mostly used to travel long distances faster than normal, not to jump across large bridges. However, as the maximum bunnyhopping speed is usually faster than the maximum strafe jumping speed (bunnyhopping is made up of a sequence of strafe jumps, after all), it is still used to make larger jumps that are even inaccessible by a single strafe jump in what is a jumping form of a run-up.

It exists in most forms of first person shooter games, Quake included, but to a much lesser extent. In QuakeWorld, it was a massively exploited feature as players could not only accelerate very rapidly to extremely high velocities, but also control the direction (due to the air control in Quake). In Quake 2 it was still possible to reach high speeds, but not so rapidly, and in Quake 3, the maximum speed was greatly diminished.

In the Quake series of games, this is the method by which you can go a little bit faster than someone who simply runs straight in one direction. This originated in the QuakeWorld modification to Quake (1). You could run in one direction and continually jump to give yourself a little more velocity. In Quake 3: Arena, you need to run diagonally (hold forward and one of the direction keys) and continually jump. This can give you a great advantage when you are running away from a newbie with the bfg, or when you are trying to come at a player from a unexpected direction.

Not as effective as continual directed rocket jumps, but quite a bit more sane if you are playing with self-damage turned on.

A very frequent occurrence when you are learning to drive a manual car. It happens when you take the clutch out too early and too quickly, that is, when you drop the clutch. If you haven't got enough revs then the car will stall, if you have too many, then the bunny hopping begins!

The car starts to go, and then stops suddenly, starts up again, the abruptly stops. Up and down, up and down, forward then stop, forward then stop. In extreme cases the car will begin to literally bounce forward along the road.

This amusing spectacle continues until the driver either stalls the car, or brings the clutch in slowly enough to make a smooth take off. For the driver it is hell, for an instructor it's routine and for everyone watching it is so funny you will piss yourself laughing.

Edit: Thanks to andersa for pointing out that the correct way to avoid this happening is "floor the clutch immediately and then try the start over again."